Human Factors

The Adobe CS5 Roadshow visited Wellington yesterday, and Mike McHugh, Andrew Spaulding and Paul Burnett from Adobe Australia spent a whole day on stage – entertaining the crowd with all the new and amazing features in CS5. Apparently reaction from the people was not what these guys are used to – usually they’ll get a lot of “Oooooh”s and “Aaaaaah”s when presenting – but Wellingtonians are a little bit more reserved. My personal feeling is, that because in Wellington a lot of people work for government, many of the attendees won’t get an upgrade to their current software anytime soon. They can only dream of all the new features that could make their lives easier and increase productivity, it’s simply not their reality. I was sitting next to three ladies, who have just recently been upgraded from CS2 to CS4, and would in theory be entitled to a free upgrade to CS5 by Adobe – but “impact assessments” required by the organisation’s IT department would take a long time and are apparently rather expensive, so they simply won’t be upgraded.

But apart from the crowd being a bit quiet, it was a great show.

After the roadshow Mike, Andrew and Paul joined the Wellington Creative Suite User Group for a very special meeting. Adobe New Zealand sponsored an enormous cake to celebrate the release of CS5, and all attendees got some further insight into the new features. A software raffle at the end of the meeting saw one lucky user group member walk away with a brand new copy of a Premium Suite license.

What a great day – big thanks to Mike, Andrew and Paul again, and to all the other Adobe people, who made the roadshow and the user group meeting a highlight!

Yay, Creative Suite 5 is coming in just a couple of days! The official global launch event is going to take place on 12 April, 8am PDT, which is a shocking 3am in Wellington – if you’re interested in getting up in the middle of the night, you can register at http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ to be part of the launch ceremony. The website offers some exciting sneak peek videos as well…

If you can’t be bothered interrupting your well deserved sleep for some software demonstrations, you might want to register at http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ap/ instead. The special Asia-Pacific launch event will take place at a much more humane time (4pm in NZ) and I guess it will cover exactly the same things as the US event.

I did ask on the WCSUG (Wellington Creative Suite User Group) mailing list if people were interested in watching the US event as a group, but that was before the arrangements for the Asia-Pacific event were announced. So I’ll go back to check with members if they would be happy to check out CS5 at 4pm as well. If you are interested, but not yet a member of WCSUG, you can join us at http://tinyurl.com/wcsug.

When?
Tuesday, March 3, 2009 from 5:30pm – 7:00pm NZDT

Where?
Modica Group
Level 4, Anvil House
138-140 Wakefield Street
Wellington
New Zealand
google map:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=138-140+Wakefield+Street+Wellington+New…

Doors open at 5.30 for social gathering and drinks; presentation (Kai Koenig: “The Spry Ajax-Framework and Dreamweaver”) starts around 5.45.

Please register for the event at http://wellingtoncsug.eventbrite.com. Your registration helps us with the preparations for the meeting and you’ll automatically take part in an awesome prize drawing later this year.

Speaker:
Kai Koenig – Ventego Creative

Dreamweaver CS 3 and CS 4 have introduced a few new very handy features for website developers using the Spry AJAX/libraries. Kai will introduce Spry and show how it integrates into Dreamweaver. We’re also going to have a quick look into integrating Spry with server technologies, but that shouldn’t keep anyone from coming…

When?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009 from 5:30pm – 7:00pm NZDT

Where?
Modica Group
Level 4, Anvil House
138-140 Wakefield Street
Wellington
New Zealand
google map:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=138-140+Wakefield+Street+Wellington+New…

Doors open at 5.30 for social gathering and drinks; presentation
(Philip Fierlinger: “Rapid Prototyping in Flash”) starts around 5.45.

Please register for the event at http://wellingtoncsug.eventbrite.com. Your registration helps us with the preparations for the meeting and you’ll automatically take part in an awesome prize drawing later this year.

Speaker:
Philip Fierlinger – Head of Design, Xero

Philip will give a condensed version of his Skyrize.com rapid prototyping in Flash workshop. See a wide range of different prototypes created for major global brands as well as innovative startups. Plus, get tips and tricks on using Flash to build these prototypes.

Wellington has now its very own User Group for everyone who’s working with products from the Adobe Creative Suite (eg Photoshop, Flash, InDesign, Illustrator etc) either as a professional or a beginner. There will be regular meetings with interesting talks and the opportunity to present your own work. And sometimes there will be cool prizes, too!

Join the group at http://groups.google.com/group/wcsug.